items tagged with Richard Linklater

Neil Patrick Harris, at the tail end of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, climaxed his hosting duties with the resolution to a magic trick he'd set up earlier in the evening. Much, much earlier in the evening.

Chris Rock is on-record as being a fan of Woody Allen movies and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy, and the comedian’s funny and thoughtful Top Five – Rock’s first film as a writer/director since 2007’s I Think I Love My Wife – is like a 100-minute blend of those influences. Then again, Allen, and certainly Linklater, would be much less likely to cap a scene with the image of a naked man getting a Tabasco-soaked tampon shoved up his ass.

Late in writer/director Richard Linklater’s Boyhood – the finest movie yet by the creator of Dazed & Confused and the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy – there’s a simple scene between a mother and her son. The son, who is either nearing or has just turned 18, is heading to college and is packing a bag in his room; he and his mom talk while she pays bills in the kitchen. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the mother starts weeping. Her son enters the room and nonchalantly asks what’s wrong (this is hardly the first time he’s seen her cry), and she replies with a litany of romantic, professional, locational, and maternal decisions that we’ve watched her make over the course of the film. She asks where all that time went. Her son, offering a slight smile of empathy, goes back to his room and continues packing. The mother buries her face in her hands, and says, “I just thought there would be more.”

Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight – the third and possibly final installment in the director’s ongoing screen romance that began with 1995’s Before Sunrise and continued with 2004’s Before Sunset – climaxes with a half-hour-long fight. You could, of course, say the same about most every superhero or Transformers picture released nowadays. The big difference, however, is that this particular battle royale takes place in the confines of one room and involves all of two characters. The bigger difference, speaking personally, is that this is one 30-minute screen fight that I actually wished would go on forever – though an eternal loop of the movie’s first 70 minutes wouldn’t have been unwelcome, either.